Change vs Release. What’s the difference?!

Change Management and Release Management are sometimes confused in people’s minds. It’s not always clear when to engage with which process and what the benefits are of doing so.
This presentation will help those who suffer from this issue and offer simple tips about how to set the ground rules between Change, Release and Project Management to ensure that new services and major work is transitioned as smoothly as possible.

·Learn the importance of a clear cut, easy to understand release policy

·Share in some tips and tricks the consultant has gathered over 15 years of working ITSM in general and Service Transition in particular.

·Learn the importance of defining exactly when someone should engage with each process

The decision to procure or to subscribe to a new ITSM tool invariably involves a significant investment. Such a purchasing decision should be treated like any other significant business investment, yet experience suggests that with regards to ITSM Tool selection the normal rules of procurement good practice are often not heeded.

Research shows that organisations typically replace their ITSM tools every 3-5 years. This is arguably because organisations suffer a lack of ITSM improvement road maps, which baseline the current state and outline the people, processes and technology resources required to reach the desired state.

The challenge is compounded as the ITSM tools market is increasing crowded, complex and dynamic. In short ITSM tool selection is a complex decision!

Join Eddie Potts, Principal Consultant of Pink Elephant EMEA, as he highlights best practice methods of choosing an ITSM tool as an introduction to the ITSM Tooling Whitepaper being released in mid-November 2016.

Peter Hubbard, Principal ITSM Consultant at Pink Elephant EMEA & Faisal Usmani, Business Development and Strategy Lead for Co

CMDB Implementation is one of the most complicated of any ITSM programmes an organisation can undertake. The difficulties in creating a toolset, capable of linking hundreds of thousands of interconnected bits of data together in a meaningful manner while also supporting a highly fluid environment with dozens of changes each week, are formidable indeed.

Join Peter Hubbard, Principal ITSM Consultant at Pink Elephant EMEA, as he discusses the Pink Elephant approach to create a CMDB in the real world. He will demonstrate the critical importance of the scoping session and understanding the organisations requirements to ensure the CMDB supports the business. Peter will then show you how to turn those requirements into concrete actions to map and create your CMDB.

Faisal Usmani, Business Development and Strategy Lead for Comms at Cyient EMEA, will build on Peter’s theme; detailing how an effective CMDB implementation forms the basis for ITSM solutions. He will cite a case study that shows how this translates into a real world operational scenario that utilises actionable dashboards and provide valuable insights into your service performance at different levels within your organisation.

At the end of the session you should know the importance of being able to ask your ITSM organisation ‘For our CMDB, do we need a battle tank or body armour?’’

More and more the Service Desk is becoming the focal point of our IT function - if we get this right the business loves us but if we get it wrong ...
The Service Desk has evolved over the last 20 years from being a “nice to have” to a critical support function to the business. Nowadays it’s the normal expectation that there will be someone at the end of the phone / email / portal 24/7 to answer any technical related question we may have, be that a request for equipment to fixing email that is not working etc.
How can we get this right? Join Luci Allen, Head of Operations at Pink Elephant EMEA, as she guides us through the many faces of the Service Desk and gives advice and guidance on just how to get it right.

Based on recent and ongoing interest in Business Relationship Management, there can be no doubt that BRM is a hot topic. Organizations realize that a better relationship between business and IT will result in more business value from the IT provider’s products and services.

But how do you achieve this from a provider’s perspective? What kind of knowledge, skills, behaviors and processes do you need? And because the relationship is by definition with the business, what do you expect from your partners on ‘the other side of the fence’? How can you help them to fulfil their side of the bargain?

This webinar references the BRM Institute's Interactive Body of Knowledge (BRMBOK) and the ASL BiSL Foundation's Business Information Service Library (BiSL).

After listening to Aleksandr and Mark share their perspectives, there’ll be ample opportunity for you to join in and contribute to the dialogue - you are most welcome!

Cultural Change is one of the hardest things to crack within any organisation, let alone within IT. IT is fast paced - moving responsively to the business, technological and even public requirements. However, a required cultural shift from within is rarely successful. On average a mere 30% of Cultural Change Initiatives are successful, and a lot can be lost when it fails!

Join Helen Windle, ITSM Consultant, as she guides you through the key points to get it right first time.

Auto Trader is the largest digital automotive marketplace in the UK with 65% of all used car transactions involving cars advertised on Auto Trader’s web services. As an online organisation it was critical to business strategy that Auto Trader find innovative ways to increase the speed and quality of their release cycles. To achieve these goals Auto Trader IT organisation had to leverage cutting edge automation and blend several best practice models for their own recipe and approach to enabling business results.

Join Andrew Humphrey as he discusses their service management journey over the past five years which has seen them start with ITIL, incorporate Lean principles, Agile development methods and DevOps automation. These incorporations have resulted in a highly flexible and capable support organisation that uses the best of breed approach from multiple disciplines to offer an enviable level of business support.

One of the most critical challenges IT departments have is ensuring their IT strategy underpins the business strategy, and more importantly, is seen and understood by the business to underpin its strategy while adding value.

Establishing an IT governance model is the tool and method which allows senior managers to choose key focus areas from multiple best practice frameworks, such as ITIL, PRINCE2, ISO27001 and ISO38500. They do this to ensure the structure of the IT department, and the capabilities of those departments deliver value and align as closely as possible to the business needs. Join Peter Hubbard, Pink Elephant EMEA, as he takes the mystery out of ensuring your IT strategy not only underpins the business strategy, but is seen to underpin it with concrete defined processes, activities, controls, metrics and deliverables all mapped back to defined business needs.

Why do so many improvement programmes fail to deliver the expected benefits?
Drawing on 20 years experience delivering targeted improvement programmes for clients around the world join Peter Hubbard, Principal ITSM Consultant @ Pink Elephant, as he discusses what aspects a successful improvement programme needs to consider, and what happens when those same aspects are neglected.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a significant portfolio development to talk about in the world of ITIL training, but that is all set to change with the launch of the ITIL Practitioner Certification for 2016!

Where ITIL Foundation focuses on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, ITIL Practitioner shows ‘how’ to start adopting and adapting the ITIL framework within day-to-day situations and responsibilities, giving individuals more confidence in their ability to structure and contribute to ITSM initiatives.

Join Luci Allen, Head of Service Operations Pink Elephant EMEA, as she outlines how the ITIL Practitioner course provides individuals with a comprehensive toolkit of templates, guides and worksheets and adds value to ITSM improvement initiatives by incorporating good practice from other methodologies and frameworks such as DevOps and Lean.

Change Management is one of the most critical ITSM processes for any organisation, but it's worryingly easy to get it wrong! All to many organisations try to deploy, or improve, this key area and struggle to gain adoption from those it's designed to support.
ITIL is a great starting point but where is a poor Change Manager to turn to when confronted with those questions that aren’t covered in the books. “Do Incidents really require changes to resolve them?” “How do I make sure CAB does not turn into a technical torture chamber?” “What happens when Change Management goes home in the evening?” “How do I stop people abusing my emergency change process?” And of course “Just what is a change anyway?!”

Join Peter Hubbard, Principal ITSM Consultant Pink Elephant EMEA, as he shares practical solutions and tips gathered in his almost 20 years experience working within ITSM across all industry sectors.

This webinar is presented by Eddie Potts, Senior Service Management Consultant, who recently completed an MBA achieving a Distinction. His study included a research project concerning the "implementation of service management”.

Eddie previously delivered a successful webinar about “Implementing Service Management” in which he compared and contrasted the real life practice to the academic theory concerning service management implementations which can be found on our BrightTALK channel. This follow up webinar builds upon this theme and discusses “at what point have we implemented service management” and “how do we maintain the momentum".

The business doesn’t understand how IT adds value to them!” is a common cry of IT departments the world over, but what is IT doing to make sure they clearly articulate the business value they deliver?

Join Peter Hubbard, Principal Consultant at Pink Elephant EMEA, as he discusses how to identify the right behaviours, the impact of the wrong measurements on those behaviours and finally how to ensure that the business recognises the hard work that IT puts in.

The economic significance of application management is often underrated. Did you know that about 40% of IT budgets is spent on keeping applications up and running, up to date and under control? But are you getting enough value out of your investments?

This webinar explores application support, maintenance/renewal and strategy.
Takeaways:
- overview of the whole Application Management domain and its relationships with the business and other IT disciplines and external service providers
- better understanding of the costs and benefits of Application Management and how to influence them
- frameworks, standards and trends and how to benefits from them

Join John Hudson, Thinking Dimensions, to learn how to:
- Identify the key stakeholders represented in any situation
- Identify the Critical Thinking skills and processes that underlie a successful Root Cause Analysis
- How to successfully prioritise issues every time
- Identify the core issues represented in any situation
What you will take-away:
- An appropriate set of Thinking processes to adopt
- An intuitive and structured set of Questioning techniques
- Structured templates that allow for the timely analysis/filtering of information
- The confidence to adopt the process for your everyday work

Problem Management is one of the most useful processes within ITIL as it allows an organisation to identify the underlying issues that generate incidents over and over again and removes them. It supports the change from reactive to proactive and makes customers happy by providing information and a process on those annoying issues that keep coming back to haunt them, and when they can expect to see them gone forever. However, with all this to offer many organisations still struggle to get the funding to implement this process as its seen as a duplication of effort with incident management.

Join Peter Hubbard, Pink Elephant, as he shows you how to set up this process on a part time, unfunded, but effective way. The point is not to say that Problem Management does not need a budget, its to show you how to build up support by doing the basics anyway and showing how much better it could be if the organisation DID fund it properly!

Many organisations struggle to implement a successful ITSM program, with multiple attempts at the same issue being undertaken with almost clockwork like regularity every 3-4 years. But why is it so hard to implement an ITSM framework that delivers real business value? How does a Program Manager even approach this issue? Where is the checklist for implementation success?

Join Peter Hubbard, Pink Elephant EMEA, as he maps out a structured approach to successful implementation of an ITSM initiative. He will discuss the considerations of which processes should be attempted first, the importance of the toolset, and, the one underlying area that is almost always neglected but is responsible for the failure of over 60% of all ITSM implementation projects; The people who have to work in alignment with the new world. And yes…. There will even be a checklist for implementation success.

The recent (well within last few years) usage of Agile project management approach to deliver business driven requirements faster has presented a few issues to IT Service Management and in particular the integration with ITIL processes. Agile practitioners say of their methodology that it is lean, adaptive, delivering fast and relevant results for the customer through rapid development. In direct contrast, the ITIL practitioner will seek security, availability and stability of a Service through the control and management of change and risk to the live (production) environment. This webinar looks to introduce some of the issues and perhaps suggest some ways to overcome them.

One issue that Incident and Problem Management departments face is being able to resolve an incident without knowing what has broken or failed. Is this possible? and if so, why do you still need Problem Management

So join Dave Jones as he clarifies these issues and explores further questions:

- Should we focus on identifying root causes as part of the Incident Management process?
- Can we use the proactive prevention aspect of Problem Management to stop the same thing from happening again? The end result being a memorable customer experience of service excellence.

The Service Catalogue is one of the most useful tools an IT department can create. It forms the basis of the relationship between business and IT by clearly and simply stating what services IT does, and by extension does not offer. However many Service Catalogue creation projects founder as basic assumptions are not challenged and fundamental questions are not answered leading to uncertainty as to what a service catalogue look like or even does. This presentation will discuss the various types of service catalogues that are available and the areas of the misunderstanding that are most likely to cause an implication project to founder.

Within all organisations there is an ongoing “tug of war” between the requirement to provide support to the user community, including escalation support in the event of Major Incidents and the significant cost of providing these services outside of core hours. Join us as we discuss our Out of Hours Support Services. We will cover:

Pink Elephant is an international business innovator and knowledge leader in the field of business transformation. With IT and consulting services, Pink Elephant enables clients to translate knowledge and creativity within their organisation into results. Beginning with its foundation in 1980, Pink Elephant has perceived the synergy between man and IT as the most important tool for businesses to innovate and increase their competitive advantage. Pink Elephant is active in more than 20 countries and alongside business and management consultancy also provides Enterprise App Services, IT Services, and Education Services.